Rockets’ Red Glare

Three minutes out, we’re twenty minutes behind.  In the waning hour of the nation’s 250th birthday party, we’re screaming westward in Engine 31.  Mitch, our best driver, is at the wheel.  Zach, one of our two quite excellent captains, is in command.  In back, Lt. Jason and newly minted Firefighter of the Quarter James hear the scratchy radio traffic with me; Columbia County dispatch dryly notes the “twenty-minute benchmark”. 

The benchmarks come in ten-minute increments for the first thirty minutes.  They are meant to give the Incident Commander a not-so-quiet tap on the shoulder; how are things going?  Time is human artifice to begin with, but it distorts at a fire scene.  So much is going on, so many people are competing for your attention and the enemy is so dynamic and all-consuming, that it is easy for the person quarterbacking the fight to lose track of time.

Hence, the dispatch metronome against the onslaught of tasks.  Are rigs in motion?  How many are on scene?  How many are in transit?  Is there a water supply?  Has it been secured?  Is there entrapment?  What’s the size-up?  Is a 360 complete?  What’s the flow path?  Are utilities live?  Do we need ventilation?  Are hoses deployed?  Has entry been made?  Is there a RIT crew ready?  Is there water on the fire?  Have the roof and second story been laddered?  Is the primary search complete?  Are there victims?  Do we have the fire knocked down? 

GPM > BTU is the name of the game.  It is not a game. 

The research is sobering.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found five-person crews applied water to residential fires 22% faster than two-person crews.  Four-person crews were 16% faster than two-person crews and 6% faster than three-person crews.  Here’s the problem: because two-person crews took significantly longer to get water on the fire, they routinely faced a fire that had grown to 2.1 megawatts (near flashover conditions). Conversely, larger, faster crews engaged the fire when it was half that size, resulting in vastly faster knockdown times and far less building collapse danger.

As the benchmarks are announced by dispatch, anyone who knows anything does their own silent calculus in their head.  Are we ahead?  Are we gaining ground?  Are we falling behind? 

Factor in furniture.  Seriously.  UL research highlights why rapid knockdown is harder today than it was decades ago. Due to synthetic fuels (plastics and polyurethane foam found in modern furniture), the timeline to a catastrophic flashover or roof collapse has contracted.  Residential fires in the 1970s used to have an average time to flashover of 29 minutes.  Because most everything in a typical home is now basically petroleum in solid form, modern residential rooms average flashover in less than 4 minutes. Thanks, IKEA. 

It is the waning hour of the nation’s 250th birthday party in the drunkest state in the union.  Every volunteer fire department has the same problem, at the wrong time: members away, tied up, unavailable, or already committed elsewhere. Lodi Fire needs assistance, and Columbia County dispatch calls for it.

The cavalry is on the way, from multiple departments.  Zach lets the twenty-minute benchmark rest for thirty seconds before raising the Lodi IC on the radio.  “Command from Poynette 31”  “Go 31”  “We’re two minutes out.  Where do you want us and what’s our assignment?”  “Behind the tender.  The assignment is ventilation.”

I do not honestly recall if “Fuck” came out of my mouth before or after “Cool.” 

Ventilation means chain-sawing a gaping hole in a roof to ventilate heat and smoke out of a building so the interior conditions become more tenable.  It is one of the more badass things firefighters get to do.  It is also one of the more dangerous things firefighters do.  It is so potentially dangerous that many departments strictly forbid the practice except for the most dire of circumstances.  All of that goes on the “cool” side of the ledger.

The F side of the balance sheet is it will be twenty-five minutes, at least, between first report of fire and us getting on the roof.  Even without any furniture with too many vowels and three extra letters, twenty-five minutes is a very long time for a house to be on fire and, as I cinch up my SCBA straps while Mitch wheels 31 onto the street the house is on, I am guessing the rafters are not made of steel.  They’ll be wood.  Wood on fire for who knows how long.

Well … the F part just makes the cool part cooler. 

I suppose this is where a tough guy would make some sort of short declarative manly statement.  Damn the torpedoes, or some such thing.  The best I had in the moment when Mitch set the air brake and we jumped out of 31 was … okey dokey.   

Okey dokey. Ventilation = Ground ladder, roof ladder, roof saw, irons, New York hooks.  Let’s go.  Why the oldest guy is carrying the heaviest thing is anybody’s guess.  Because I got there first. 

Well, sort of.  There’s a party at the house across the street and the neighborhood is packed with cars and people.  Fifty or more well-lubricated patriots, who I am trying not to hit with the twenty-four feet of aluminum on my shoulder.  I am guessing, but do not know for sure, that fireworks started the fire.  There is a Lodi engine in front of the house, pumping away.  A ranch house, 70s vintage, with a low-slope roof.  We’re told the two residents are out, woken by neighbors.  Good news is always appreciated. 

The low-slope roof is also a spongy roof, as Zach and me find out when we get on it.  A roof with a fence of flame just on the other side of the ridge vent as we walk up it.  Find a good spot for a hole and Zach rips into the shingles and sheathing.  Having grown up on motocross bikes, the song (and smell) of a two-stroke at full wail is a fond (and oddly comforting) memory.

Remove the chunk of roof and there’s (I’ll say “ample”) fire in the attic.  You don’t normally use the vent hole for water application but, every fire is different.  We get a hose handed up to us and get to work knocking down the attic fire before our low air alarms go off.  It’ll be the first of several times the Engine 31 crew gulps through air bottles on a street we’ve never been to and will more than likely never return to. 

Here is a fire scene truism.  You guess at any number of things.  You only see what you see and there’s gaps in the story of time and space that you fill in with something reasonably feasible to have a mental map of what to do next. 

I would have guessed the chain-sawing / attic firefighting would have been the thing that stuck with me.  But it is not. 

After we knocked down the fire, our next assignment was inside the house, salvaging family keepsakes before we had to tear down the ceilings to make sure the fire was fully extinguished.  Pictures, jewelry, keys, wallets; the normal parts of a family’s life it takes for granted when it goes to sleep.  You go through any room where the ceiling has to come down and look for things that matter to take them out of the house. 

A box light helps if you have one, but it’s usually just your helmet light.  It is a very particular firefighting experience.  Strange smoldering home, strange smoky rooms, the sound of breathing amplified as your regulator breathes with you.  Darth Vader breathing and a small pinpoint of light through the haze, constantly in motion, looking for things that can’t be replaced.  Pictures are the most important: telling the story of a family’s shared life.

The pictures always tell the same story.  A family that loves each other.  Wedding pictures.  Baby pictures.  Graduations.  Vacations.  Grandkids. 

Here’s the thing: on a strange street, in a strange home, in strange smoke-filled rooms where it’s hard to see, you’ll see your own family in the pictures.  We gather them with care we would give our own treasures, and take them out to a tarp, for safekeeping.      

I am not the fire inspector, but it is easy to imagine some random firework landed on the back side of the roof and started the roof on fire.  The fire worked downward, growing on the back side of the house where the fire was not immediately visible.  Everyone got there as fast as they could and did good work, but the house sustained significant damage.  Thankfully the couple who lived there were roused by neighbors and got out.  They are safe, and they have as much of the irreplaceable things we could get for them.  But somebody, somewhere, did something irresponsible and wreaked havoc on an elderly couple in their family home.

Nobody could have meant it, but it happened. 

I hold these truths to be self-evident.  Time may be a human artifice, but it is all we have.  Freedom is certainly to be defended and celebrated, but “independence” is a chimera.  We are at our best when we honor our interdependence.  To appreciate others.  To be empathetic.  To not harm strangers through indifference.  To help when we can help. 

If you have even the smallest curiosity about serving on a volunteer fire department, give it a try.  You might have a more festive, carefree life being one of the partygoers watching the big red trucks at work. 

But the cavalry spirit of an engine crew doing the work … is far more intoxicating.